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Crock, 5/2/23

Clearly a lot of Crock strips will have you saying “What on earth is going on here,” but today’s Crock really has me saying, “No, really, what on earth is going on here?” I guess we’re meant to understand that the French Foreign Legion’s militarized colonial regime makes a mockery of the rights to free speech as laid out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, but it’s very funny that the way this is conveyed is by having Crock declare that “signs are illegal!” And honestly, this angle just seems like it’s adding unnecessary confusion to a joke about how Grossie is protesting (?) something in a hypocritical way, but the engine for that middle panel’s gotta come from somewhere, I guess.

Mary Worth, 5/2/23

Wait, did we know that Dr. Ed was widowed? I don’t think we did, and I am enjoying Estelle carefully composing a neutral position for her facial features as she processes this information and begins to grasp that Ed’s issues might go a bit beyond “burned out at work.” Just another successful Mary Worth romantic yoga session!

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Folks, we need to start off on a sad note: Dennis Lien, who for many years posted in the comments here as Shrug, passed away last week under hospice care. He was a great force for good vibes on this site and he will really be missed!

Blondie, 4/17/23

Dagwood can tell Alexander is “getting serious” romantically because he’s wearing “clothes that fit,” like a monocolored t-shirt that he carefully tucks into his belted khakis. The extent to which this comic doesn’t understand teenagers manages to go even beyond the extent to which it doesn’t understand adults, which is really saying something.

Gil Thorp, 4/17/23

MILFORD GEOGRAPHY ALERT: today we establish definitively that Milford is in the “pop” zone, and while this encompasses a broad swath of the United States, from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains to Rockies to the Pacific Northwest, it seems to definitively cut out other commonly cited location possibilities, like Connecticut. Sadly, Hoo Dad’s Root Beer does not appear to be a real regional product that we could use to narrow things down further, but I will provide more data on this as it comes in.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/17/23

If you’re curious about what educational and intellectual life in Hootin’ Holler is like, I’d like to point out that Jughaid is thumbing through what appears to be an unbound six-page leaflet about volcanos, which I assume has been written by hand.

Crock, 4/17/23

Oh look, today’s Crock rerun is a joke about, uh, children getting married to adults? Here’s hopin that this is what it finally takes to get Crock cancelled (I will accept either the modern “cancel culture” sense of the word or the more traditional “they stop running it newspapers” sense, whatever it takes).

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Dennis the Menace, 4/7/23

Last month I speculated on Henry Mitchell’s career status, based on my half-memory that he might be an engineer, and readers pointed me in some intriguing directions. In the 1950s/60s TV show, Henry works for Trask Engineering; on the fan-maintained Dennis the Menace wiki, we’re told that he’s a “a workaday aerospace engineer,” whereas on actual Wikipedia it says he’s “a workaday teacher at Dennis’s school,” which is clearly wrong (also I am desperate to understand why “workaday” appears in both those descriptions but I think I need to apply for a research grant so I can fully analyze the situation). Anyway, I’m going to take the preponderance of evidence here and accept that he’s an engineer, which makes Dennis turning to this total stranger for engineering advice all the more menacing, though based on Henry’s sidelong glance I assume these two are coworkers and he’s basically saying “See? I told you what a moron he is.”

Hi and Lois, 4/6/23

When I was in high school, our debate team hosted a tournament one year, and I was in charge of getting the trophies, and the time spent tracking down a trophy store and picking out the design and getting the orders in really rearranged the way I think about accolades like this. You can just buy a trophy or a medal that says anything you want! They don’t necessarily mean anything! Still, I appreciate today’s Hi and Lois as a corrective to this attitude, as it shows that if you get into buying and handing out trophies as a bit, your loved ones will get sick of your shit almost immediately.

Crock, 4/6/23

OK, fine, usually just slipping “[LATEST TECH FAD]” into a sentence at random and claiming it’s a punchline is something that sends me spinning into a rage, but this one somehow loops around all the way into being funny again. Like I’m laughing just imagining some callow teens that exist entirely in a boomer’s imagination brought to the brink of starvation and sullenly gnawing on their phones. “I love phone,” the teens say, refusing to make direct eye contact with adults in a forthright and masculine way. “Phone good.”